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How Fast Do New Homes Sell?

We've expressed a few times the feeling that new construction in Manhattan Beach seems to be its own market. It's a market segment one where demand is so strong, everything seems to sell quickly at big numbers.

Of course, for each rule, there are exceptions.

When the South End new construction home at 513 Longfellow (5br/6ba, 5125 sqft.) went into escrow Wednesday, it had logged 9 months on market - and had a broken deal in its past.

So we decided to run some numbers to answer: How fast do new homes typically sell?

There have been 54 closed sales of new construction in Manhattan Beach within the first 11 months of 2018. (Data reported on the MLS; there will be some that weren't reported.)

You can see from our chart that the most common result is a sale within the first 30 days on market - almost half of the sales found a buyer that soon.

Indeed, 10 of the 24 sales showing fewer than 30 DOM were actually pre-sold before coming to market, then reported so that the sales would go into the database.

Meantime 40 of the 54 sales took less than 3 months to find a buyer.

So, a longtime lingerer like 513 Longfellow was an unusual phenomenon.

Nerdy data note: We're using "combined" days on market (CDOM) rather than regular old DOM for this analysis. If a home was re-listed or rebooted to clear DOM, we don't want to use "artificially low" DOM figures. We want to know how long it really took to sell.

Nerdy data caveat: Sometimes new homes are listed before they're ready, just to troll for buyers. This can lead to "artificially high" DOM counts because no one can buy an unfinished house. When we looked at the actual sales in this mix, however, long market times for incomplete homes were very rare.

A few new construction listings that hung around this year before making that big deal:

3605 Oak - modern new SFR in a challenged location near a hotel and Rosecrans; sold for $2.575M with 335 combined DOM across a few listings (the start was $2.995M).

320 35th St. / 319 34th Place - new modern townhomes in the North End; they needed a bit more than 6 months on market. Both sold reasonably close to their start prices, however ($2.960M and $2.500M, respectively).

81 Morningside - spectacular "brownstone"-inspired home across from Robinson school, sold for $5.650M, later came back to market upgraded, but did not re-sell.

The DOM champ for 2018 was a 2016 new build at 2600 Grandview (6br/8ba, 4400 sqft.), which compiled 508 DOM across a couple of listings while falling from $6.975M to $5.300M.